Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of my communities in the south-west of WA, I want to sincerely thank the Leader of the Opposition, who recently came to my electorate to announce that, under a coalition government, there will be no offshore wind farm in our iconic pristine Geographe Bay, one of the most naturally beautiful parts of Australia and indeed the world. I specifically want to thank the Leader of the Opposition for listening to the majority of our south-west community members, who are strongly opposed to this seriously flawed Labor government proposal. Our communities know that this Labor wind-farm plan does not add up on economic, environmental or social grounds. However, what we also know is that, as always, Labor is simply steamrolling regional communities in its obsession to get to its 82 per cent renewable target by 2030, done by ruthlessly riding roughshod over our communities, forcing our regional communities to bear the burden of Labor's intermittent, unreliable renewables-only obsession.

Put simply, Labor's green dream is our regional communities' worst nightmare. Just look at Broken Hill as a prime example of what happens to regional and remote communities dependent on the unreliability of Labor's renewables and battery storage policy. Picture hundreds and hundreds of around 300-metre turbines covering 4,000 square kilometres of Geographe Bay. What a dreadful and appalling blight on the major tourism and recreation attraction in the south-west of WA. For countless locals, as well as the tens of thousands of visitors to the south-west, Geographe Bay is the drawcard. It is their amazing marine recreation area for boating, fishing and diving, for instance. It is without question absolutely the wrong place for Labor's wind farm.

There will be massive costs in the construction, maintenance and removal that we will have to pay for by way of our power bills. There will be kilometres of undersea cables, and substations will have to be installed to bring that energy ashore, causing severe underwater disturbance. Once onshore, transmission lines will have to be built through highly productive prime farming, agricultural and vegetable-producing land. Added to this, as each successive new wind project is built, it will need its own separate and additional undersea cables and substations, as well as its own separate and additional transmission storage and connection to the South West Interconnected System. Each one of these hundreds of wind turbines will have to have its own exclusion zones. Global exclusion zones range from 50 to 500 metres on all sides of each turbine—north, south, east and west of each turbine. These are no-go zones, no-fishing-or-diving zones.

It's my understanding there are currently no policies or guidelines on safety and protection zones anywhere in Australia. All the details and durations of these zones are unknown. Our community is being sold a Labor pig in a poke. Of course what we do know is that the fish will congregate around the substructures in these exclusion zones and draw recreational and commercial fishing species away from permitted fishing zones. Our south-west says no, and the coalition says no. We say no to 4,000 square kilometres of 300-metre massive wind turbines in Geographe Bay.

There are also, as we know, national security and defence issues, and I see that Sweden has rejected 13 offshore wind projects over defence concerns around unacceptable consequences for Sweden's military and defence. Consider the Virginia subs that are coming in along our coastline. As I said, this project does not add up on economic, environmental or social grounds. Offshore wind, as we know, costs at least three to four times more to produce than onshore wind. That is according to a CSIRO report released last year. To recover the very high construction, installation, maintenance, management and eventual removal costs of these in around 25 years, who will be paying the increasing cost of power? Our south-west individuals, families, businesses and industry will be forced to pay through increasing power bills. But there's a second one: as a taxpayer, they'll have to top that up through Labor's Capacity Investment Scheme, which underwrites the proponent's tendered price if the market does not agree—a double whammy; not just one additional cost to taxpayers but two additional costs. I thank the Leader of the Opposition for saying no.